“What's Wrong with the Elevators”: From Breakdown to Policing in Chicago Public Housing

In this paper, I argue that the high-rise elevator comprises a particularly important and yet heretofore undertheorised space for understanding narratives about failure and breakdown in public housing in the US and beyond. Using Chicago as a case study, I draw upon historical newspaper articles and interviews with former public housing tenants, as well as interviews with former police officers who worked in public housing developments, to show how broken and vandalised elevators became a metonym in public discourse for the widely perceived “brokenness” of high-rise public housing writ large. Insofar as malfunctioning elevators symbolised social immobility, were seen as a locus of crime, and drained the housing authority's finances, they also became a site of intensive policing. When that intensive policing failed to solve structural problems in Chicago's public housing high rises, policymakers demolished them.